Starring Juliet Stevenson and Tchéky Karyo. Rated PG.

If a bigger waste of time comes to a theatre near me, or even you, I don’t want to know about it. The script, as provided by director Joan Carr-Wiggin, is horrendous to begin with. But the fact that this made me actively dislike actors as reliable as Juliet Stevenson, Tchéky Karyo, and Daniel Stern is downright unforgivable.

Stevenson, who virtually defined pained (if educated) romance in Truly Madly Deeply, is merely painful to watch as a middle-aged Englishwoman keeping a rendezvous on a vacation in Malta with a man she met there 25 years earlier (Karyo).

Of course, bringing your kvetchy husband (Stern) and two annoying daughters isn’t the best way to keep an already dim flame burning. This absurdity could yield some precarious comedy in more capable hands. Instead, everything is treated with the same mix of bumbled embarrassment and strained self-empowerment that turns each scene into a disaster worse than the one before it.

Sexually, the leads have all the chemistry of rivals for the last seat on a bus to Las Vegas. This is made even worse by Stevenson’s propensity to get through every encounter—even the potentially tender ones—by stammering like a bad Hugh Grant impersonator. Karyo merely sits there with the tired smile of a man waiting to get paid.

Anyway, the filmmaker’s idea of characterization is to have hubby obsessed with jigsaw puzzles (the fool!) and to make wifey a frustrated writer (you go, girl!) who gave up her dreams of—well, you get the idea.

Perfectly titled for audiences looking for additional reasons not to see it, A Previous Engagement is the kind of international coproduction that gives the planet a bad name.